Our eighth year provided us with some challenges in terms of funding personnel and projects around our woodland creation work. With Forestry Commission's funding for ReKindle ending in March 2025 (a three year programme), we had made some headway into generating a small amount of income from ReKindle - getting small woodlands back into management, but our main learning from the project, was that it was not easy to generate sufficient income to pay for the co-ordination and management of the volunteering for ReKindle. The three key personnel on the ReKindle project, offered to reduce their rates of pay, and we grateful to a private benefactor who took on the costs of the three personnel. We are now operating with volunteers in six woodlands, including a significant PAWS (Plantation in Ancient Woodland site) in the middle of a community run golf course. The hope is to undertake PAWS restoration work there, and bring the site back to ancient woodland. In Horsley - our main Hazel coppice site of 8Ha, we opted to fence the annual coup being cut - with mainly donated fencing and our own fence posts cut from the wood. This will give us a better idea of the impact of Roe deer as - so far - we have managed to exclude them. The income for ReKindle comes primarily from charcoal sales, and we launched a programme of local stockists, supported by a 'charcoal' page on our website. This increases our ability to distribute charcoal across the region, however it reduces our profit margin by going wholesale. We attended several shows again - often taking (but not using) our large mobile charcoal kiln, and also selling charcoal direct to the public, giving us a higher profit margin. It was great to see people coming to find us to get charcoal, having seen the quality of it at a previous show. Volunteer signups steadily increased on our Better Impact software - heading towards 200, although attendance numbers still seemed fairly regular. Our community engagement through tree planting work was given a boost by winning a two year tender in autumn 2024, for several councils within the North East Community Forest. We utilised Eventbrite as a way of promoting events where people could come along and plant trees in their area. Seeds2Trees Round 3 was launched, and planning undertaken for the collection in Winter 2025 of saplings from round 1, which will be housed at Tod's Place.Tod's Place became the name of the 30 acres of land purchased on our behalf in the previous year, and a temporary tree nursery site was established - and floral surveys carried out on the pasture. We still rent the small office and a store room in Hexham, with costs covered by a benefactor, and two new directors joined the board of Living Woods in September 2024

We consult ongoingly with a Woodland Trust advisor, a partner in our ReKindle project - who continues to provide woodland assessments for woods we are working in - helping to guide our management of those woods. Our Operations director sits on various boards, including North East Community Forest, and Forestry and Woodlands Advisory Committee (NE). This allows us to continually consult on an informal and formal basis with Forestry Commission and Forestry England professionals as well as local authority tree officers etc On our volunteer days, volunteers are actively consulted with - to guide our provision for volunteers. There is now a volunteer newsletter going out In National Tree week we held our first conference, based at the mart in Hexham, where tickets sold out and over 100 people attended, with presentations including rewilding, ancient woodlands and also a background and update to the work of Living Woods. We also received funding from Forestry Commission to formalise and increase the work of WoodNet, a regular bi-monthly meeting of anyone interested in trees and woodlands - with topics including Deer, hedges, landscape scale forest design, pests and diseases.

Directors received total remuneration of £44,941, as detailed in submitted accounts. There were no other transactions or arrangements in connection with the remuneration of directors, or compensation for director's loss of office, which require to be disclosed.

No transfer of assets other than for full consideration